No chance. Mulcaire’s already spilled enough dirt that his disappearance now would raise far too many questions.
My guess. He will come forward and say that he was acting completely alone, that his tactics were not sanctioned or known of by Wade/Brooks. Coulson may put his hand up as well and take management level blame. Jail sentences, if any, will be minimal. The government will say how a few bad apples have ruined journalism’s reputation, and roll out some ineffectual regulation changes
Then, in a few years, both scapegoats will disappear into very well funded retirement.
So far we’ve got the PI, the NoW journos, Rebekahaha, News International, Murdoch, the Met and the Prime Minister defending his Director of Communications - who’s now been revealed to have been paying off the cops. This is huge, and getting bigger and bigger. I sincerely hope the shit will stick where it’s meant to, but don’t hold out much hope.
Please note how that statement leaves plenty of room to either take the blame (“I cracked under the pressure and went too far”) or point the finger (“Coulson/Wade knew what I was doing and approved it”).
This has been running for years and I’ve followed it closely. People involved say they bribe telephone companies all the time. If they can reset a password they can reset it to one their client knows for one thing. They bribe them for unlisted numbers also.
They also obtain detailed bank account details. The most recent ‘revelations’ are payments to police. Tabloid news is a ruthless big business with deep pockets and people everywhere are weak and easily corruptible.
Now we get to it, payments to corrupt police for details such as phone number to enable hacking.
So previous police investigations of this brought few results and generallly ran into the sand, not hard to work out what went on here. The fact that entire investigations appear from the outside to have been compromised indicates the extent of this corruption.
This is getting bigger and bigger, as I earlier mentioned in my paranoid fantasy, it seems entirely possible that the police and the press have colluded to use this as a way of wire tapping so they can get around judicial oversight.
Every trade unionist understands that telephones are not secure, I wonder how much information has been gathered by the poolice regarding protests and industrial action using this alliance with the press instead of presenting their case before the judiciary for phone taps.
One wonders how much MP communication has been monitored this way and has subsequently made it out into the national press as ‘unsourced leaks’
Here’s the stuff I was referring to upthread about Brooks potentially trapping herself in a lie. I’d kind of got it wrong - mea culpa - but the paper did publish a story about a voicemail from Millie Dowler’s voicemail during Brook’s tenure as editor of NotW - which theoretically means she did know about this.
Conveniently, it is claimed by News Int that Brooks was on holiday in Italy during the period that this story was produced. Apparently, she was also on holiday around the time of the Soham murders; the families of the victims seemingly also having had their phones hacked by NotW.
Two things are happening - one, the future of Brooks at News Int has obviously become a priority for the company. They are doing anything they can to remove the possibilty that she is at fault. The second thing, by extension, is that Andy Coulson, as he was her deputy at the time, is being hung out to dry. I would imagine he is going to be the fall guy - given he no longer works for NotW or News Int, I imagine that the corporation will claim that they have conducted investigations and such practices are no longer being used and thus try to worm their way out of sanction.
Coulson deserves what is coming to him. Someone needs to be able to pin something substantial on Brooks though - it’s pretty wearing how she seems to have an excuse at every turn.
I’m not fan of NOTW or the rest of the Murdoch empire, but isn’t it plausible that they got the information about the voicemail message when conducting an interview with the family?
It just doesn’t feel like rock-solid “evidence” to me.
The voicemail referred to in the article was from an employment agency - not from the family. I am no tech expert, so, to me, it’s possible that the family could have had access to her voicemail and referred to this message from the employment agency in interviews - but it seems unlikely to me that they had this access given that the initial story here is about how the family were given false hope because they weren’t getting inbox full messages from her phone, as messages were being deleted - thus leading them to believe that their daughter was still alive.
It is also possible that they did not directly hack the voicemail account and paid off a phone company worker to do it for them. This would also be pretty reprehensible.
BBC, The Telegraph and the Daily Mail all now reporting that family members of servicemen killed in Iraq and Afghanistan were targeted. What a fucking mess.